I mentioned a few times that it doesn't materially matter: i could completely remove the entire point about any external funding and let the point stand on: US foundation, authoritative control & aggressive promotion.
I’ll say it clearly again; all these things are small, all can be argued or diminished, people primarily diminish the points by leaning the idea of trust or they take a point of bad optics in isolation, but when they are all together an untrustworthy picture is visible. So “trust” is not enough to lean on.
To answer the point you just made though: I did google search the other things that they funded, and this is what came up and it comes from the time frame you claim they invested everything.
I might sound defensive, but thats because I am in a position of defending the optics, nothing in this entire thread has given a convincing response over why Signal is over-promoted and authoritarian- just a lot of very angry people attempting to argue semantics.
It's fine not to be super well informed about this stuff. Why would you be? Most subjects that come up on HN, I'm very poorly informed about, too. But it's not fine to be so noisily poorly informed that you spread misinformation, which is literally what you've done here. I've done that, too! But I believe I apologized when that happened, rather than doubling down. I hope I did! Dealing with this thread has made me super self conscious about that, which is I guess a good thing. Your blog post was so bad I experienced personal growth.
You could have asked people before you posted this story; you could have done any kind of research at all, and improved it. But you didn't: instead, you ran a piece that claimed the NSA funded Signal, and that Signal relies on server security, and that advocates of Signal are part of disingenuous conspiracy.
(You and I are the ~only people reading this flagged, buried thread now, so we can leave it here if you like).